Friday, July 25, 2014

Friends have bought a country house which, at the moment, is in the hands of their decorator. The big reveal will take place around Labor Day and knowing them and their decorator as I do, I am sanguine there'll be none of that country twaddle – twiggy furniture, antlers, plaid throws, taxidermy, botanical prints, gingham doodads, reedy wreaths hung with berries and bows, colonial-style hope chests, doggy or horsey anything, patchwork quilts, iron chandeliers, duck decoys, baskets, pinecone candlesticks, rag dolls, doilies, hutches – in fact, none of the foolishness that afflicts some decorators and their clients when faced with living in what, in reality, are suburban subdivisions on mountainsides, in former horse country, or in just-graded, tree-free, erstwhile wilderness. Living in the country, be it ersatz or real, need not stupefy a sense of proportion and send one headlong towards the land of cute and dainty.

Not that the picture is any better on the other side of the pond. Looking at real-estate photos of interiors near my home town was horrifying – so many dark-stained big-box store fittings and fixtures, staircases and balustrades, "hand-adzed" beams and rafters, "medieval" smoke hoods above electric "living-flame effect" fireboxes. And the bathrooms, without exception megastore "contemporary," left me not knowing whether to swear or laugh, as also did some of the most ludicrous window mistreatments I've ever seen. I don't think my home town or the valley where it's located is a bastion of bad-taste, though, judging by what I saw, it could well be – I have never seen so many pub-like residential interiors in my life. There the pub has an influence on some demographics and here it's the country club.

I've always had a hankering after a country house but the Celt, having lived in at least one in his youth, is resolute about not wanting to leave the city. Having heard tales of his long walk home from the bus stop through woods and by fields to the family house, often in the dark and wet, I cannot blame him. Nowadays, of course, it is unimaginable that a boy would be allowed to hike a mile or two at any time of year without accompaniment. Those days – not that long ago, as I'm sure he'd remind me – were very different.

At the time I left home, in my early twenties, I had never gone further than the woods and farms surrounding our house and the villages around my home town I knew by name only. Pendle Hill was visible from our garden, as were the valley sides, with their sheep-grazed fields and stone walls – but I had no real appreciation of it. I was too busy hiding to look outwards.

The last few years, we have visited the area, but only in winter – which isn't the best season, given the short, grey and wet days, for being a tourist. On this trip, the long, warm summer days made true tourists of us, drawing us out onto the moors and into the smaller towns and villages.

I realize now how much influence the architecture of my youth, however unappreciated then, has had on my aesthetic. The long, sooty rows of stone-built houses, the Gothic Revival stone-built churches and the simpler non-concormist chapels, the churchyards with gravestones listing family histories well into the the 17th and 18th centuries and occasionally, if I wandered into church, the wonderful stained-glass windows.

The reredos in my primary school's church has stayed in my memory as one of the most magical things I had ever seen, but of dark carved wood rather than the gilded and painted object it now is. The school building is long gone. I'm not really sure why "improvement" means pulling down perfectly good buildings or, for that matter, why Spanish patio-compatible terracotta tile replaces flagstone in a medieval church but ... who am I? I no longer live there.

So, with rain threatening we walked through the lychgate – I noticed that the arriving funeral did not pause there as it once would have for the first part of the ceremony to take place – to take a few photographs of the church and its yard. Lych is old English for corpse; lychgate is not the romantic destination brides of today and their photographers find it to be. Beautiful, though, with its late 19th-century carved detailing and slate roof.

I walked and walked, amazed with the beauty of it all – an historic beauty I was only just seeing for myself – snapping photograph after photograph until, as I've done before, I realized I was missing so much by putting the lens between me and the buildings I saw.

It rained eventually. Pendle Hill (see above) disappeared under clouds, almost as we reached the Singing Ringing Tree. A man, just leaving as we and the rain arrived, remarked it was in fine fettle that day and so it was – humming, singing and sighing with the wind that passed over and through it. An intangible song of weather befitting a landscape of hills, moor, rock, running water and, if legends are to be believed, witches.

My brother-in-law and I were too cold and wet even to be amused at the spectacle of my 5' 10" husband sharing a small, packable umbrella with my sister who is 10 inches shorter.

Wednesday, July 23, 2014

I'd never thought that the King's Cross area of London as being anywhere other than a place to avoid – very run-down with tarts galore – but this visit, my first, proved how long-established my ignorance has been. During the last twenty years or more, the area and the railway station have been regenerated (the area, beginning with The British Library and the station with a marvelous canopy above the new Western Concourse) with hotels like the resurrected Great Northern Hotel and George Gilbert Scott's St Pancras Hotel, restaurants, residential and commercial buildings being built, and older structures made sound and adapted for reuse.

Newton after Blake

Eduardo Paolozzi

The British Library, architecturally speaking, is underwhelming, but, in the Sir John Ritblat Treasures of the British Library Gallery with an exhibition of more than two-hundred items, overwhelmingly reveals itself as the treasure house of world culture and knowledge that it is. As the web page for the exhibition states, half of the exhibits have not been in public view for many years and, believe me, the list of those exhibits is formidable. With exhibits such the earliest dated printed book, the Diamond Sutra, Handel's Messiah, the Gutenberg Bible, Laurence Olivier's script for Macbeth, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (a thousand-year-old book, give or take a minute or two), a First Folio of Shakespeare, and Magna Carta, this British Library gallery is well-worth a taxi-ride across London. In fact, it's downright awesome!

For over forty years the front of King's Cross Station was obscured by a "temporary" structure and it is only recently that structure has been removed and replaced with a relatively new (in modern times) phenomenon – the piazza. Not yet finished, but very well-used by travelers and those who meet them, this new piazza is a place to keep wallets safe and to wonder at the variety of the human face.

King's Cross railway station is fronted with mellow-yellow brick arches that trace the shapes of the massive iron-arched train sheds behind. Easy as it is to forget that for the Victorians (King's Cross was built in 1851) structures such as these were the acme of contemporary technology in architecture – a point that is immediately evident when one walks from the old structure to the new Western Concourse with its soaring fountain of a canopy – a covering suggesting the springing of the gothic arch of St George's Chapel, Windsor, rather than the Gothic of the nearby St Pancras railway station.

King's Cross Western Concourse

Lewis Cubitt, the designer of King's Cross railway station was also responsible for the design of the Great Northern Hotel seen in the photograph below to the left of the station. The hotel has gone from being drab and basic to contemporary "boutique" hotel with a redesign and renovation reputedly costing £45,000,000 ($76,687,117). This is where we stayed for the first of the family parties before we headed north to Lancashire and Scotland.

Photographs of Newton after Blake by Eduardo Paolozzi and the King's Cross Western Concourse are from Wikipedia Commons. All the other photographs are mine.

Wednesday, July 9, 2014

"Everything that goes into a room should be meaningful to the owner – status decorating is over." So declared David Whitcomb in 1974 when interviewed for Architectural Digest. Would that his claim had carried weight with more people in the following decades – it's quite clear that status decorating has never left us and probably never shall.

The interviewer is nowhere recorded, surprisingly, but I intend to quote both him and Mr Whitcomb himself to describe the decorator and the decorator's own home – a place clearly full of things meaningful to the owner – they both will do a better job than I. If there's any emphasis on status in this house, and I'm sure there is, it is not crude. I have written about Mr Whitcomb before and should you wish to see more of his talent and his, to me, timeless decorating please click here or look for his name in the sidebar "Labels."

"Just in from his second home, in upstate apple/dairy country, David Whitcomb, in well-broken-in walking shoes and a cozy, stretched-out sweater, settles himself down on a u-shaped bench in the duplex where he's lived since 1959, the same year he purchased the five-story graystone townhouse. A seemingly relaxed man, with nice blue eyes, graying hair and a quiet sensibleness about him, he admits:

" 'It's difficult for me to talk about myself and my design work, especially something that is so basically visual. Words, somehow, aren't right in this case. And you see, I'm not one of those designers on an ego trip. It's very important to me that the results I try to achieve do not come out looking like Joe Whosit or Jane Whatsit did them. I've seen so many designers only interested in themselves, it's made me turn around and get more into my clients' point of view. Frequently clients don't have the time or interest or knowledge, but they always have a point of view.

" ' I don't know if I have a word for my style. I don't like that word 'eclectic.' Let's say it's a collection of dissimilar pieces, both in county of origin and period of time, from this bench to that highly carved Chippendale armchair in flame-stitch fabric.

" ' As a designer I see so many objects that turn me off. I'm very particular about what I want around me, even to the simplest things. I feel that everything that goes into a room should be meaningful to the owner – objects one loves, not just things that represent money. Status decorating is over. After all, really incredible beauty is often something you cannot bring into a room. Like a tree branch coated with ice. There's transitory beauty!

" ' The act of design is a creative one, which makes for a certain amount of ego, I guess. I'm proud of what I do but I don't think it need to develop into egotism ..... I have never had a client who didn't have taste. That's why they come to me.' "

As I wrote above, I've let David Whitcomb speak for himself and as far as I am concerned his house needs no description of contents and finishes for it, too, speaks for itself. This is a house, as have all of Whitcomb's been, a place I would have like to have spent time, talking, reading and listening to music. It is a subtle and sophisticated room, long-gone, I'm sure, and to my eye quite undated.

That "Kentian" table in the second photograph reminds me that I'm catching a plane in a few hours, first to New York, thence to London where we'll visit the William Kent: Designing Georgian Britain exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum – an exhibition I'm looking forward to immensely and one I missed when it was at the Bard Graduate Center before the end of last year.

We are going to New York, London, Edinburgh and Dundee for theatre, exhibitions, a birthday party, a family reunion, reunions with old friends, and to spend time with two very excited nieces, eleven and thirteen years old. The twenty-four-year-old nephew is being very cool about it all – as is only to be expected. I, on the other hand .... well, more about that from over there.

Photographs by Daniel Eifert to accompany text written (anonymously, as far as I can see) for Architectural Digest, May/June 1974.

About Me

An interior design history enthusiast and in my own way an erstwhile chronicler of those I call the Lost Generation - those men, some of them gay and many of whom died of AIDS in the 1980s and 1990s, and who are to a great degree forgotten.